Saturday, 5 August 2017

Ultimate Tic Tac Toe

Swami Gulagulaananda said:
"You can always make a mundane problem interesting by thinking about scaling it"

Tic Tac Toe used to be one of the standard games played by us in school along with Dots and Bingo. The problem with Tic Tac Toe is the frequent draws you end up with once you are familiar with the game. Eventually, it gets really boring and you stop playing the game.

One day, I stumbled upon a blog post at Math With Bad Drawings, called Ultimate Tic Tac Toe. The post discusses this problem of Tic Tac Toe and comes up with a very interesting approach. In this post, I have provided an implementation of their idea for you guys to play.

While you can read the entire content in that post, I will summarise it here.

Rules:

You are provided by a 3x3 board of Tic Tac Toe boards. That's 9 boards.

The first player can make his move in any square.

The next player has to make his move in the board depending on the square in which the previous player made his mark. For example, if the previous player chose the top left square in any board, the next player has to make his move in the board that is in the top left.

This constraint makes it pretty fun because you have to think of maximising your points while being careful about where you are driving your opponent

The goal is to win most number of boards. Whoever wins 5 boards wins

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